I Watched a FANTASTIC FOUR Quadruple Feature So You Don’t Have To

This post originally appeared on Panels, which is now Book Riot Comics

It all began when I noticed that the 2015 Fantastic Four film directed by Josh Trank was up on HBO Go, and I thought about giving it a whirl because, honestly, I wanted to see if it was as bad as the reviews said. Then, I discovered Netflix was streaming the 2005 Tim Story-directed film, ooh, and the Roger Corman-produced, but never released, 1994 film was on YouTube… It was decided: I had to watch them all, and I had to live tweet the experience. But, it’s a rule: you can’t have a Fantastic Four triple feature; I had to make it a quadruple feature, or, honestly, it just wasn’t worth doing. So, I threw in The Incredibles, which isn’t technically a Fantastic Four movie, but it may as well be, and, seriously, don’t I get to watch at least one good movie during this experience?

Now, it should go without saying, but here’s your obligatory spoiler warning:

The action started Sunday night just before 10pm with this tweet:

Shit’s about to get real. About to start the Roger Corman Fantastic Four movie as part 1 of my FF marathon. pic.twitter.com/S460zSF3q2

Watching The Fantastic Four—directed by Oley Sassone and produced by Roger Corman—was a surreal experience. Of the four movies, it was by far the most comics accurate, though in an incredibly dated way. Sure, those white collar costumes are ripped straight from the comics, but they scream post-Byrne ’80s FF.

See, I told you.

For some reason, Corman et al also decided it would be a great idea to keep the Storm boarding house backstory, so we have a whole scene where teenage Sue (played by Mercedes McNab of Buffy the Vampire Slayer!) fawns over Reed and Ben plays video games with a prepubescent Johnny. Later, Reed and Ben go back to the boarding house to pick up Sue and Johnny, who have apparently just been sitting around for a decade waiting to go to space.

Turns out that was a jeweler’s loop, and he was in fact named “The Jeweler.” I never really figured out what was up with the jeweler-theme; I mean, he stole a “diamond” (it was definitely not a diamond) from Reed & Co early on, but it wasn’t really clear why other than, hey, it’s a jewel and he’s the Jeweler. Mostly he just lived in the sewers and led a group of mangy sewer dwellers who were pretty much just Morlocks with goatees. Also, he for some reason falls in love with Alicia Masters and has her kidnapped so that he can make her his queen of the sewer folk. He makes literally zero sense, but for some reason is featured really prominently in the movie’s trailer. (I’m told he was originally meant to be Harvey Elder, the Mole Man, but the filmmakers didn’t have the rights, so he’s instead a weird jewelry-themed Mole Man expy. Believe it or not, he’s not the only one.)

The movie isn’t all bad, though; it ultimately has a lot of heart, even if it has no budget. It has the feel of something I might have watched on USA’s Up All Night or Mystery Science Theatre 3000 at the exact time it was being made. It’s basically the movie equivalent of a puppy: it’s so campy it’s impossible to stay angry with it for more than a couple of seconds.

Story had approximately 100 times as much money to spend as Corman/Sassone, and you can tell immediately. We get fancy schmancy opening credits instead of stock footage of space. We get actual action shots instead of awkward cuts designed to make it look like something happened. We get actors you’ve heard of before (nope, Mercedes McNab doesn’t count, cause we heard of her after her appearance in The Fantastic Four).

We got to the cosmic storm so much faster in this version. Also, you can tell there’s a budget this time. pic.twitter.com/52sYaewFxJ

There’s a lot of wacky silliness that verges on camp here, but it’s actually almost a genuinely good movie. I’m not sold on either Alba or Gruffudd, but Evans and Chiklis are pitch perfect as Johnny and Ben.

Of course Johnny’s hitting on the hot nurse. Of course there’s a hot nurse.

While Alba isn’t great as Sue, I don’t think it’s fair to put the blame on her. She doesn’t have great material to work with. But at least they only did the “Sue strips down to escape from the crowd” thing once… Oh, wait, nope, they did it twice.

Sue’s hounded by crazed fans, so she strips down again to disappear. Guess she hasn’t figured out the invisibility fields yet.

But, the crazy thing is, the movie still works. Or, at least the first 2/3 of it still work. It more or less falls apart during the third act when Doom comes to get his revenge. It just isn’t very exciting, and I’m pretty sure I managed to doze off for a few minutes in there. But, they manage to save the day doing the exact thing I predicted at the beginning of the movie.

“Supernova: Bad. Got it.” He’s totally going to supernova before the end of this, isn’t he? And that was the crossing the streams speech.

As the movie went on, I found myself hating Mr. Incredible with a fiery passion. It wasn’t that I didn’t relate to his “life was better back in the day when I could do that thing I loved” attitude; it was that I couldn’t get past the litany of lies and the patronizing attitude toward Elastigirl.

Much more bro jerk than Reed, who is more indifferent know-it-all jerk.

I hadn’t seen it before, but I obsessively read the reviews when it came out and had developed a theory. The reviews were universally bad, but most in a conflicted sort of way. They often said something along the lines of “this movie was a mess, but…” The result was a horrifically low 9% on Rotten Tomatoes, but I had trouble believing it was actually a worse cinematic achievement than Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip (currently sitting at 16% of RT). Nope, this was a case where Rotten Tomatoes’ binary fresh/rotten categorization failed to account for the nuance of nigh-universal reviews that basically just said “meh.”

Well, let me tell you, I was both right and wrong. This movie was bad. Really bad. But, about 85% of the problems come down to one thing: the narrative structure is all kinds of screwed up. Imagine if you will if the Sam Raimi Spider-Man film had spent forty minutes with Peter before he was bit, another forty minutes before Uncle Ben got shot, and then the Green Goblin showed up in the last ten minutes. That was basically this movie.

There were also some major problems with the tone, which was apparent almost immediately.

The massive exception: Victor. Victor comes off as a complete jerk from the moment he shows up, and never has a remotely endearing moment. You are glad when he gets stuck behind in the other dimension and you hope against hope he’ll somehow never come back.

Victor’s the kind of jerk who erases your whiteboard while you’re in the process of writing.

I think Victor’s problems arise from him having been the victim of extensive changes during rewrites; according to early leaks from the set, Victor was going to be a hacker who went by the name Doom online, which makes sense given how we first see him.

Victor Von Doom was working on same thing as Reed but now just stares at like 7 monitors like a boss. He’s wearing Google Glass or something

And, with that, the long national nightmare was finally over. I had reached the end of my marathon of Fantastic Four films, and I had miraculously survived. Just remember; I did it for you, dear reader. I did it for you.